After looking over some discussions on the topic, I realized that installing Mac OS X within PearPC is not really as time-consuming as I initially thought. So instead of waiting until summer break, I decided to give it a spin yesterday. Took about 3 hours to install while I was sleeping last night, and I woke up this morning to a spiffy little welcome screen.

Now until PearPC came along, installing a working copy of OS X on my x86 laptop was nothing more than a dream. Forget the speed issues. Forget the minor bugs. Just think about it. Being able to boot up to an almost useable Panther desktop is a huge achievement in itself. And the speed of development is nothing short of admirable. Huge props to the PearPC devs for making the "impossible" possible.

So does this mean everyone can go ahead and install copies of OS X on their x86 machines? Probably not...not yet, that is...unless of course, you're doing it just for the heck of it like I did. It might be a better idea to wait until later stages of development. I have no doubt in my mind that it can only get better than it already is, seeing the dedication of the dev team.

So what's OS X like? Lots of fun to play with, no doubt. Like any other new toy, there's so much to explore. It's just very different from any other OS I've used so far. I even had to sign on to iChatAV at some point to ask Dave how to go about taking a simple screenshot. Hehe...thanks for the info, Dave. I was also quite surprised and impressed to see Expose and the Genie effect actually working to a certain degree with a mere 16MB of VRAM within an emulated environment.

In case you didn't already notice, I sent a picture of the initial installation phase to my MoBlog last night. I'll also post more pictures and screenshots at some point in the future. In any case, being a 3 day weekend, I haven't had a chance to do much work today, so I should probably kick-start it now. Have lots to do for next week.
More later...

EDIT: I just thought I'd post a starting point for those who want to give this a go. Here are two nice guides on how to go about it, as well as other resources:
Guide 1
Guide 2 (Thanks to Dave for this one)
PearPC Project site
PearPC nightly w/ Windows networking & fullscreen patches
PearPC processor-specific optimized nightlies

Being a rather active Blogger user (as you can tell), Google offered me an invitation to test drive their GMail service. I first got the invitation about a month ago, but I decided to sign up just yesterday.

Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of webmail and I like having POP3 access with my own domain, so I probably won't be using my new GMail account all that much. But I have to say, if you don't want to pay for a domain-based address, GMail is definitely the way to go when it starts offering accounts to the general public. It's a beautifully designed service.

Since it's Google we're talking about here, the interface is obviously very clean and very simplistic, and all you see are text-based AdSense ads - no ugly banners, popups, annoying Flash ads etc. I really like their idea of threaded sorting in which all your mails are sorted and displayed like an instant messaging conversation. Since I don't have much mail in the new account yet, I haven't tried the mail search engine. But then again, it's Google, so I know I won't be disappointed if I ever need to use it. Finally, you really can't complain when you get 1000MB of mail storage as compared to the measly limits set by most other free webmail services, and an attachment size limit of 10MB can be really useful when you need to receive large files.

So if you're still clinging on to that Hotmail, Yahoo (or whatever else) account, it's time to let go.
As it promised, Google delivers again.

Something different and interesting after a long time. Most of the work pressure ended on Wednesday evening, so once I got back from the physics lab this evening, I had some time to kick back for a change.

UCLA's Dining Services had a customer appreciation event this evening, and the theme was the "Carnival of Desserts." As you would expect, it was pretty much a sugar festival with free candy, ice-cream, desserts and what-not. Decided to go with a bunch of friends from Hedrick, and it turned out to be a fun evening. All of us decided to eat a relatively light meal so we'd have space for all the desserts, so once we were there, it was time to invade. I probably consumed more sugar in one evening than I have during the entire week - 4 sticks of cotton candy, popsicle sticks, snow-cones, strawberries-n-cream.....I'll stop there.



The event ended with a raffle giveaway. Now here's the thing - I have never, to this day, won anything in a raffle, but for some reason I decided to stay anyway, especially since the prizes were so damn tempting - a car, iPods, a Sony PS2, CD players, mini TVs, movie tickets etc. There were about 180 prizes in total, and the raffle took literally hours, but (and this shouldn't come as a surprise) I still managed to come back home empty handed. Now that's just painful.



In any case, I should get started on tomorrow's work. Been a nice, entertaining day. Oh, of course...I got a few pictures at the event - not too many since I was obviously too busy eating to the point of exploding. So check them out if you're interested. I'll see if I can get more pics from Eugene later. For those that don't already know, the gallery is on the pictures page, as usual.
Ciao!

MoBlog MoMent: The Carnival raffle giveaway...in which I didn't win anything. :(

Just saw this over at OSNN, and thought I'd share it with the rest of you.
This whole melody is created entirely using the built-in Windows Sound Recorder, and the default Windows sounds.
Check it out here.

MoBlog MoMent: Mmm..Sushi!

1. Troy - out in theaters tomorrow!
2. Van Helsing - heard mixed opinions on this one.
3. The Day after Tomorrow - out on May 28th.

Movies that should be avoided like the plague:
1. Mean Girls - doubt I'd watch it even if someone paid me to.

Wonder if I'm going to get a chance to catch them anytime soon though.
Having so much work from uni sucks...

Most of you who keep up with tech news probably already heard of the latest Longhorn alpha build that was showcased at the WinHEC earlier this month. Well, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to give it a spin last weekend. Surprisingly, part of the DWM features (this is the hardware-accelerated desktop) work with my puny 16MB Radeon 7500. The semi-translucent window borders, the spiffy new Alt-Tab effect...all of that works. What doesn't show up though is the window pop-opening effect. This is most probably due to the fact that the card doesn't have pixel shader support. Apart from the eye-candy and new versions of bundled software, there isn't really much else going on in this build. I was sort of disappointed to see very little progress on the WinFS forefront. It's still slow, buggy and a memory hog, but then again, considering it's an alpha build, I won't be complaining. The OS does have a lot of potential and I'm eager to see what becomes of it by the time it hits the shelves in 2006.

Now there's been quite an impressive breakthrough in the world of emulation. The new PearPC project is an open-source initiative that aims to emulate the PowerPC platform on x86 machines. It's the first emulator that's capable of running Mac OS X on an x86! Taking into account the fact that it's the first 0.1 release, things are slow and buggy, but it really shows great promise. People have been able to go through a complete installation of Panther and are able to boot to the desktop as well. Some have even managed to use applications such as Chess, iTunes and iPhoto successfully. While I won't be jumping in so soon, I'm keeping a very close eye on this project. I've waited for something like this for a long time, and it finally seems to be becoming a reality. Very impressive.

Laptop manufacturers like Dell, IBM and others have upgraded their line-ups with the new Pentium-M "Dothan" core processors. With a 2MB L2 cache and higher clock speeds, these things are extremely power-efficient speed demons now. Unfortunately, still on the pricey side though.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the new wireless card for my laptop wasn't working properly. Turns out it isn't a problem with the card itself. With a little bit of tweaking, I'm now able to pick up several access points and I can connect to anything that's within range. Tested it out in the physics lab last week. Works perfectly at full signal strength, and it's nice and speedy. Problem arises when I try to connect to the main UCLA WLAN. There's some issue with the VPN authentication process that's preventing me from getting access. I'm going to have to talk to the wireless people here, perhaps sometime later this week, to get it sorted out. I'm just glad it wasn't a problem with a brand-new card.

First off, I should thank everyone who remembered today (Wait...it's 12:15 AM now, so technically, I should say yesterday).
Thank you all for your best wishes.

Lots of people asked me what I planned to do today. Well, I'm sure this is going to come as a shock to some, if not most of you, but I spent almost the entire day on a rather drab physics lab report. If I had a choice, I obviously wouldn't. I would have loved to spend the day doing something more interesting, but I needed to get this done, simply because I have another midterm coming up on Thursday that I still have to study for. No worries, though. I'm hoping the coming weekend will be a little more relaxed than the last one was. Sure, the work isn't going to stop all of a sudden, but the load does get a little less once in a while. That's the only time you get to throw in that little bit of fun.

On a slightly more frustrating note, the wireless card that I got doesn't seem to want to stay connected to any network. The signal reception seems uncommonly weak, and it's just not working the way it should. Trouble is, I can't figure out if it's a problem with the card itself, a problem with the internal antennae in the laptop, or a conflict between the Intel utility and XP's built-in wireless config tool. And since I barely have time to walk out of my room, much less do anything else this week, I'm not going to tinker with it any further until Friday evening at the earliest. I've basically decided to call Dell Tech Support and see what can be done. If it doesn't sort itself out, it's probably going to have to go back. Might consider getting a different card altogether then. Let's see how it goes.

Need to get back to reading, so that'll be all until Thursday evening probably.
See you all on the other side.

It's May Day!

That means I'm going to be turning 19 in 3 days. Got a wonderful little card in the mail from my grandparents back in Bombay. It was waiting at my desk when I got home from uni last night. Beautiful wordings inside.
And speaking of cards, I got an very practical gift from my brother too -- an internal MiniPCI wireless card for my laptop! It's the new Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG card that ships with most of the latest Centrino machines that offer 802.11g. This is going to be extremely handy when I'm in uni, since there are university hotspots at different locations all over campus. So all-in-all, I'm already really happy. A good start to month, don't you think?


Another interesting thing coming up on the 4th - Microsoft showcases a new Longhorn build at the WinHEC. Hopefully, we should be seeing some new additions. I'm quite interested in following the development of WinFS, besides the obvious Aero eye-candy features that everyone is looking forward to.

Not much else to say really. Going to find something to eat. Ciao...